Hicks: This season's South Alabama football team needs to forget last year's unbeaten record

G.M. ANDREWS/Staff PhotographerSouth Alabama assistant coach John Turner gets a celebratory dousing at the end of the Jaguiars' victory over Huntingdon last year, which wrapped up an unbeaten season for USA.

The T-shirts are still in vogue and still accurate: South Alabama football, Still Undefeated.

That was the magic of 2009's historic first season for the Jaguars. Not only did the team get the program started, it won each of its seven games. In doing so, it built interest and a solid fan base while putting South Alabama on the college football map. Just as importantly, it found an audience it really wanted to reach: Recruits.

It was a good season, a good first step, a good beginning.

Now it's time to leave it behind.

The first season and all that was accomplished is something that should now be left to school historians, to fond memories and scrapbooks. If South Alabama is to be ready to make its move to the top rung of the college football ladder for the 2013 season it can't afford to linger in the aftermath of past perfection.

South Alabama should enter Season Two with the first season in the rear-view mirror, not hanging like fuzzy dice from that mirror, obstructing the view of the road ahead.

And it wouldn't hurt to consider itself, at least in some ways, as that first-year team trying to prove it belongs. The Jags now must prove they belong with the next set of opponents.

They must prove it to their fans, whose expectations for the team have increased. They must prove it to recruits, who won't be swayed simply by one undefeated season. They must prove it to themselves, over and over and over again.

The schedule once again is designed for that purpose, though it certainly is filled with more roadblocks than a year ago. The prep school and junior college opponents are gone, replaced by a 10-game schedule of four-year programs from the Division II, Football Championship Division and NAIA ranks. Gone is the cushy, every-game-at-home schedule. The Jags play three games on the road. Instead of Fork Union Military Academy, the Jags will face Nicholls State; instead of Army Prep, they travel to Cal-Davis.

There's another opponent standing in South Alabama's path that it didn't face a year ago -- success.

Now that they have won games, they will be expected to win more. As head coach Joey Jones has repeatedly reminded his team, there is much much to be proud of from 2009, but that season will not define the program.

Without question, the South Alabama football team that takes the field this season will be a much better team in terms of talent, depth and experience. But the degree of difficulty in posting another perfect season, even a successful season, has increased.

T-shirt slogans and past victories are of no help now. Just like last season, this South Alabama football team must make its own way and there's only one way to do that -- by looking forward.